


The Woods Today

by halotolerant



Category: Tin Man (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-01
Updated: 2010-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You'd better not go alone; the forest bends wrong</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Woods Today

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the Yuletide 2008 challenge for Kati-Lara, thank you Lorelei for a great last-minute beta

The forest bends wrong.

Cain isn't usually given to agreeing with Glitch's stranger pronouncements, but on this one he's going to. This forest isn't particularly darker or windier or thicker than any other, but there's something about walking down the paths that raises the hairs on his arms and sets his teeth on edge.

"And the flowers aren't right either. Spring flowers are Ladyfew and Rezdered and Ychorine. These are all wrong. I love flowers, you know. And at spring we have the Rosebud Ball, at the palace. You have to ask a young lady who's never been to a Ball before. Or... I suppose it has to be a young lady, I never really dared clarify."

Cain swallows and just pokes some fallen pine cones again with a stick - there are no conifers anywhere he can see, just oaks, and yet here are newly opened cones with papery seeds still hidden within them.

Glitch can't control what he says. If Glitch wants to talk, then listening and thinking about it is like watching a woman change her dress by a window when she hasn't a blind to pull down.

Without ceremony, Glitch sits on the soft ground of old pine needles and moss. "After the Rosebud Ball comes the Festival of Two Birds. You don't ask a lady to that unless you know exactly what you want to say to her!" Glitch laughs, and turns to look at him.

Cain tries to smile, but it isn't enough; Glitch's face suddenly falls and he starts muttering nervously to himself, trying to run over his own conversation. Somewhere around young ladies he loses himself again.

"They like almond cakes, young ladies. Almond cakes filled with almond paste and pink icing on the top. Well, I like almond cakes, too. So Captain Ertem got me some and he said: What can be the harm? They're only cakes. And I told him I was answerable to the Queen herself and he said, Like the Queen and all her soldiers could put me off."

Cain isn't listening - really, truly isn't listening in the slightest or mentally marking "Ertem" in case he still exists somewhere to be scowled at. He isn't listening, but he's sure that he shouldn't not listen to any more of this (and hell if talking to Glitch didn't do a thing or two to his own sentences), and he places a hand gently on Glitch's shoulder, which is often a less disturbing way to re-divert his flow of verbiage.

He doesn't expect Glitch to take his hand, but then it would take less than a minute to list the times Glitch has been predictable.

Cain was always a good poker player, always saw deep into a person's eyes and down inside them. Saw not just whether they lied but why, whether it was on account of having children starving or because they wanted something shiny on their chests to make other men envious.

Glitch's eyes are expressive, but no more telling of the man than the colour of the sky betrays the mysteries of the heavens.

Glitch takes his hand and pulls himself up and then smiles, bright and eager. "What are we doing, Cain? What are we up to now?"

"Finding a way out of this forest." Cain grunts the words and looks around them again. Glitch seems not to want to let go of his hand and he doesn't want to hurt him by being the first.

"This is stupid forest, we shouldn't have come here. It bends wrong."

"It kind of does. But DG wanted to know what lay out here, remember?"

"We shouldn't have come alone, I'm sure I told you we shouldn't have come alone."

"Alone was what I was aiming for. You were not part of the alone plan. But you wanted to come. Said something about flowers."

"I love flowers."

"So I hear."

"Say, Cain?"

"Yeah?"

"You ever been to a Ball before?"

Glitch's grip on his hand isn't that tight, but it's intimate somehow, and when Glitch asks the question (his face lights up for a moment when he does so, and Cain can almost see the memories, little grand figures dancing in his eyes), he lifts Cain's hand until for a moment Cain thinks he's going to kiss it.

Glitch would do that sort of thing, that sort of crazy foolish thing. Like when Cain woke up not dead in that carvan full of blankets and silks and rude engravings, and Glitch kept talking about warmth, and climbed into bed with him without any apparent thought whatsoever of how goddamn dangerous...

There's a flower in his hand. Glitch has picked one of the strange things that look like Bluefever but somehow aren't, and pressed it into Cain's palm, which starts sweating for no good reason.

"Thank you." Cain knows he's blushing and that only makes him feel more embarassed.

"So you'll come to the Ball with me?"

Cain tries for the thousandth, millionth time to really read Glitch's face, to see inside his mind. And then remembers and calls himself a fool. God knows what passes for motivation inside Glitch - certainly nothing worth trying to draw inferences from.

He coughs, playing for time. He's amazed that he doesn't just want to yell "No, wild horses couldn't drag me to a thing like that" and that be the end of it.

"When there's a Ball, Glitch, I'll get back to you, OK?"

"OK." Glitch lets his hand drop - it feels weirdly cool without him - and starts walking on down the path.

"Hey, don't get too far ahead!" Cain sprints forward; Glitch has got a lot further than him in barely any time at all, even taking into account that Cain waited, staring at his hand a little longer than strictly necessary. There's something really wrong with this forest.

"What if we're lost?" Glitch is looking up towards the canopy quite calmly.

"We've been lost before. We've been worse than lost before."

"I lost my brain, Cain. Hey. Brain. Cain. Brain. Cain. That's like a poem or something."

"You do better with no brain than a lot of people do with one. Maybe not in poetry, but overall. And you're happy. You are the most fricking happy thing this side of the Old Red Field."

"I lost just about everything, why would I be happy?"

Cain looks at him quickly. There's a brief flash in Glitch's eyes, something half like iron-cold reason.

Not for the first time, Cain wonders how he might have got on with the man Glitch used to be. Sometimes he longs for it, longs for a person who'd know what you said that morning about that afternoon, who'd put together facts and reach conclusions anywhere near reality, who'd stop saying things everybody already knew were the truth, but didn't want to think about.

Sometimes he's glad they took that brain away. He can't seem to make himself feel guilty about that, even though Glitch can apparently make him feel just about every other shade of emotion they have on offer.

"You often you seem happy." Cain shrugs. There's a strange cry off in the trees, where the forest thickens. They really shouldn't have come here. He'd just wanted space; to breathe, to think, to try and figure out what should happen next. Then it turned out, in the immediate future, Glitch had happened next, and Cain had already said he'd go and investigate this area, and he couldn't back down just because he had Mr Non-Sequitur Commentary in tow.

"I was never happy before," Glitch observes. He picks up a pine cone and hurls it into the trees. Something cries out again, in pain.

At Cain's look, Glitch only shrugs. "I remember I had excellent aim. And those things, those..." He visibly searches for the word. "Very dangerous, anyway."

"Oh, good." Cain gets his gun out, cocks it.

"Because I was always so nervous," Glitch continues, as if the whole unnamed dangerous animal thing was the idle conversation here. "Imagine letting anything slip! I never said what I thought at all, all these ideas and feelings and things I wanted to say to people, I never said them. I never said them ever." He shakes his head sadly. "And now I suppose I must have said it all, sooner or later, so I don't worry anymore."

Cain puts his arm out, guides Glitch a few steps to the relative cover of close-growing trees. "Get back against this lot; I'll keep a lookout." The trees he's chosen are covered in silver birch bark, but growing long dangling strands of weeping willow.

Standing against the trunks, Glitch lifts his own arms, slides them round Cain's waist and looks into his eyes with a kind of wonder.

"Are you going to give me my almond cakes? I don't mind if they're not expensive."

"Hey, I'm Cain." Cain takes a moment to breathe - Glitch's mouth is very close and very red and very wet. "Not Ertem. Cain. I don't do cakes very much."

"Do you like flowers? I love flowers. And dancing. But you have to dance with a girl."

Cain ducks his head. Glitch is too near, smells too much like familiarity and caring and something dangerously close to home. His body is hidden away, but Cain knows what it's like, knows from that long night in the caravan, Glitch naked and innocent and so unbelievably warm beside him.

His eyes, right now... Cain has to stop looking at them.

Has to keep talking, because right now that's the only method he can think of to keep distance between them.

"You don't have to do anything." Cain isn't sure if that makes sense; he's just using the first words he can grab, certain there's more to what he's communicating than the mere meaning of his sentence. Is that how it feels to be Glitch?

Glitch's face is very serious. "I have to ask you to the Ball. I think I'll be sorry afterwards if I don't."

"If I left tomorrow, would you even remember me?" He spits the words out, from some place deep inside that hurts like a heart breaking, except he doesn't have one to break, he thought he'd made sure of that.

Glitch frowns, flinches. "I remembered you before I met you," he says reproachfully, which could mean anything at all, for heaven's sake, although what if they did meet? What if one of those awful parties he had to go to while he worked in Central City included Ambrose, slick in uniform, smiling carefully and yearning for a man to dance with?

There is a tree straight ahead of them that Cain could swear wasn't there two minutes ago. Just a pine tree, but smack in the middle of the path, almost like it's waiting.

"Hey, Glitch." Cain looks round them again. There's a hell of a lot more flowers, too. Like a carpet of them, edging towards their feet as new, soft blooms poke up from the ground. "Something bad may be about to happen. Stay with me, OK?"

Glitch leans closer, rests his head against his chest, right over where the heart ought to be.

"Always."

Cain can hear twigs snapping some way away, getting closer. He gets an arm round Glitch, shoves his hat firmly onto his head and raises his pistol.

Glitch fits into him kind of nicely.

With Glitch things are never predictable; this could still maybe be a really good day.


End file.
